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So•cial•ist fem•i•nism

Why not?

Because economic exploitation and gender oppression are deeply intertwined. The sexist notion that caregiving and domestic labor are “women’s work” is awfully convenient for capitalists: If a woman’s natural role is to care for her children, then who needs paid parental leave or public child care?

As for paid labor, professions dominated by women are assumed to merit lower pay. Take teaching: Once women began entering the historically male-dominated field, pay declined across the board and teachers became a prime target of the Right.

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“You are a woman in a capitalist society. You get pissed off: about the job, about the bills, about your husband (or ex), about the kids’ school, the housework, being pretty, not being pretty …” —Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 1976 essay, “What Is Socialist Feminism?”

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Can’t we just call it “feminism”?

Would that we could! But some types of feminism aren’t especially concerned with racial or economic oppression. Corporate feminists might be content with a company marketing “The Future is Female” T-shirts and promoting women into management, but socialist feminists want a living wage and full benefits for the women who sew the shirts and care for the executives’ children. (Or better yet, the women who sew the shirts could run things, while enjoying publicly funded child care.)

What does socialist feminism look like in action?

One great example is Iceland’s 1975 women’s strike. Organized by socialists and radical women’s councils, the strike saw some 90 percent of Icelandic women take a day off from their jobs and chores. Schools and airlines shut down, bank executives had to perform customer transactions and a national newspaper printed at half its usual length for lack of women to operate the printing presses. Today, Iceland has one of thesmallest gender gapsin pay and education in the world.

I’m a feminist and I want to be a socialist, but what about the Bernie bros?

This is a contentious question, so let’s just acknowledge that there are men who identify as socialists, and maybe even feminists, and still engage in misogynist behavior—from talking over women at meetings to harassment and assault. In our experience, most socialist groups today address the problem through anti-harassment policies, racial and gender quotas for elected leadership, and socialist feminist caucuses to make sure gender issues don’t get siloed. It’s not perfect, but that’s why feminists need to stake out an active, visible role on the Left: We need socialism to win, and it can’t win without us.

Party Unity My A**, a group started by Clinton supporters against Obama back in 2007

Posted by Trakar on 2018-10-05 13:26:13

This helped me see the deep ties between, socialism/feminism, capitalism/men. Capitalism seems to be hailed and driven by masculinity and socialism by the feminine, -- very interesting.

Posted by crydiego on 2018-10-02 18:29:42

They did acknowledge that it was "contentious" did they not? The duplicity of this nasty bit of campaign rhetoric is inarguable, I agree. Supporting the Sanders campaign and criticizing Clinton and the DINOs, I had it thrown at me more than once, and saw it thrown at others just as often, and not once was it directed at anything any feminist would call sexist or misogynist. Very often it was thrown at criticism from female feminist supporters of Sanders. It was always arbitrary, blind desperation in defense of the indefensible.

That being said, younger would-be feminist-socialists who encounter the term need to understand what was really going down. It needs to be deconstructed to get a clear view past what corporate/establishment media present to us as feminism, just as with socialism. Was Stalinism socialism? What about the New Deal and FDR? Are those things unrelated, and if they are related how? The histories of feminism and socialism are in fact deeply intertwined. For me at least they are inseparably one.

Sorry for being sketchy here but what is "PUMA"?

Posted by sherlockhemlock on 2018-10-02 05:48:51

There were so many groups that the authors could have targetted that would actually be considered misogynistic but they chose to attack this Clintonian named group of Bernie Sanders supporters that they insulted as "Bernie Bros", a Civil Rights minded Progressive group of people who are more likely than not to be the ones actually standing side by side with women to help them win equal rights and pay. The contributors of this article discredited themselves by including such PUMA biased nonsense in their article...

Posted by NightriderXP1 on 2018-10-01 09:46:24

I don't think the authors of this statement have endorsed the Clintonian partisan boilerplate of "Bernie Bros"--they simply acknowledge that being a socialist does not automatically immunize anyone from perpetrating misogynistic or male chauvinist acts.

Posted by sherlockhemlock on 2018-10-01 02:21:57

It is one thing to dimly intuit that the urges toward socialism and feminism are interconnected, but until you are prepared show how that bond can actually work, it is probably best to keep quiet. The path to effectively melding socialism and feminism surely requires something more fundamental than simply tossing both existing impulses into a single pot and stirring them together. The process will need to generate entirely new social forms to achieve its revolutionary goal. At this point nothing could be more clear than the fact we do not yet know what these forms are. The pain of a dysfunctional, rapidly disintegrating status quo is now being sharply felt. The need for change is apparent. But prematurely spouting half-baked generalities does not move the ball forward.

Posted by woofer on 2018-09-29 15:25:28

I COMPLETELY AGREE.

Posted by CapsPsycho on 2018-09-29 09:22:18

Man. Some of the articles this issue are awesome! Unions activating to build affordable housing? Yes! We need to nationalize the health system? About time!

And then you totally alienate me with this stuff. Way to sink your ship with this insulting marginalization of "Bernie bros."

I'm not anti-feminism, and I'm certainly not anti-woman, but you only get to hold one overarching political priority in mind at a time. And you either prioritize the entirety of the subject classes at once, or you prioritize the entirety of women, regardless of their class. The first includes all the women of the subject class. The second excludes all of the men of the subject class. I categorically reject that prioritization of constituencies.

Any identity politics beyond the identity of the subject class is destructive of solidarity. Socialism hasn't been obscured or overshadowed or even overtaken by Marcusian demographic liberation, socialism has been destroyed by it. There is no Left anymore, there is only Liberation Liberalism, and they are not even close to being the same things. They are incompatible ideologies.

Posted by CapsPsycho on 2018-09-29 09:21:39

Whenever I hear or read somebody using the term "Bernie bros" I just tune them out. If, by this time, they still fail to realize that this was a term invented by Clinton partisans to smear her opponents they are either willfully ignorant or have an agenda that requires dishonesty to advance. Life is too short to waste time engaging such people. Kinda like evangelical Trumpsters.

Posted by JOSGOOD on 2018-09-29 09:14:58

I think your a Fucking Moron !!!

Posted by JERRY BELL on 2018-09-28 17:15:13

drivel---US teachers have always been female dominated; american feminism is masculism....this is why it was funded by the CIA